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Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. By MARGARET A. FARLEY. London: Continuum, 2006. Pp. 322. $29.95 (cloth).
Margaret A. Farley's greatly anticipated and now award-wirming booL?, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, is as much a framework for Christian sexual ethics as it is a ready specimen for future historians of early twenty-first-century sexuaUty. Just Love offers a scrupulously researched and presented resource for current Christian (and human) sexual ethical discourses and discernment. The question Farley poses in various ways throughout her book is: "When is sexual activity appropriate in human relationships?" (272). In consideration of this question, Farley divides her book into seven chapters, with only the sixth specifically offering the new framework. This arrangement leaves the first five chapters to develop the ethical equipment with which she later constructs her framework. Chapter 7, then, applies her framework to three specific ethical questions: marriage and family; same-sex relationships; and divorce and remarriage.
In chapter 1 Farley immediately cuts away entrenched Christian discourse structures, which, in the past, have halted much ethical discussion, for example, the binary structure of "traditionaUsm versus radical change" (2). Instead, in her depictions of earlier Christian sexual ethics, she prefers to use language of preethical norms (taboos) and sociaUy constructed ethical norms rather than mere ethical norms per se.
Chapter 2 offers a survey of these sociaUy constructed sexual ethical norms (especiaUy from antiquity and Christian tradition), which Farley presents in a chronological fashion, as a backward glance from the present, with a hint of evolutionary progression through time. Foucault, who claimed to study not the history of sexuality but the history of the experience of sexuality, considerably influenced her reading of the ancient Greeks and Romans. While her survey of Christian tradition is both supple and exact, it is notable for its approach to the doctrine of the Fall of Adam and Eve, a crucial subject for any Christian sexual ethic. In this chapter and throughout her book, Farley lets the doctrine of the Fall exist within a theology ? with which her methodology aUows her to disengage. Having established that much of Christianity's ear?er sexual ethical norms emerged as contextualized social constructions, the Fall then easily drifts into the background of...